CNN fact checker Daniel Dale shredded President Donald Trump for recently telling one of his “remember” lies ― events that the president asks people to recall but didn’t happen.
On Sunday, Dale commented on a doozy from last week when Trump claimed there was no wind to power televisions when he debated a doddering Joe Biden on June 27, 2024, so people couldn’t watch it.
“The president is making stuff up again,” Dale said.
“More than 51 million Americans watched that debate on television alone, including people, of course, in the state that produces by far the most wind power and that is Texas, Republican-dominated Texas,” he said.
Trump’s story is “completely made up and the underlying premise that TVs go out when the wind isn’t blowing, also completely made up by the president of the United States,” Dale added.
Dale pivoted to two other claims in which Trump “has asked people explicitly to remember something that absolutely did not occur.”
Trump has insisted that while at his Scotland golf course he predicted the 2016 Brexit referendum would pass the day before the vote. He actually went to the course the day after the vote, Dale said.
Dale offered other fibs of note this month that one could filed under “fake history,” including Trump’s anecdote that President George Washington had two desks next to each other ― one for business and one for the presidency. In perhaps a more significant whopper, Trump recently claimed that 38,000 Americans died building the Panama Canal.
Mostly echoing previous statistics cited, Dale said, in fact, during the U.S. construction phase, 5,600 people in total died and more than 5,000 were mostly poorly treated workers from the Caribbean.
“So the president’s making up numbers, making up anecdotes and making up things he’s asking us to remember even though he made them up,” Dale concluded.